Sacramento Labor Boss Spends $1 Million Against Prop A – Utility Ratepayers Pick up the Tab

Here’s yet another scoop from the Dayton Public Policy Institute about how unions are influencing the June 2012 elections in California: one supreme union official based in Sacramento has pumped $1.14 million into San Diego to defeat a city voter initiative called Proposition A. And some of the cash originally comes from utility ratepayers.

For readers unfamiliar with Proposition A, read immediately below. Those who know about Proposition A can proceed down to read about the union sources of $1.14 million for the No on A campaign.

Who Supports Proposition A in San Diego, and Why?

In 2011, San Diego voters signed petitions to qualify a Fair and Open Competition ordinance for consideration in the June 5, 2012 election. Now designated on the ballot as Proposition A, the Fair and Open Competition ordinance would prohibit the City of San Diego from requiring construction companies to sign a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) with unions as a condition of working on a taxpayer-funded project. It also contains language requiring the city to post certain contract information on-line. The campaign to enact Proposition A is strongly supported by construction companies and construction trade associations. Government-mandated Project Labor Agreements reduce the number of bidders competing for contracts and therefore increase costs for taxpayers (as academic studies, basic economic theory, and common sense would predict).

Who Opposes Proposition A in San Diego, and Why?

The main opponents of Fair and Open Competition policies are construction trade unions, which regard government-mandated Project Labor Agreements as an effective political tactic to cut bid competition and raise costs for their own benefit. With Project Labor Agreements, union organizers can completely avoid the unpleasant and time-consuming task of selling the benefits of unionization to skeptical workers. Instead, they simply ask their political allies in government to give them a union monopoly on construction!

Most construction unions in California belong under the umbrella of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, a union conglomerate based in Sacramento under the leadership of president Bob Balgenorth. If you look at the list of contributors to the No on A campaign (Taxpayers to Preserve Community Jobs, No on Measure A, sponsored by labor and management organizations), you’ll see the top two donors are Sacramento-based union-affiliated organizations under the direction of Bob Balgenorth. These two entities contributed $1.14 million to the No on A campaign, comprising 96% of all campaign receipts.

Let’s take a closer look at these two massive organizations funding the No on A campaign. One of them is a routine political action committee, but the other is a conspiracy theorist’s dream come true. The Sacramento-based committee known as “Members’ Voice of the State Building Trades Council of California” made a late expenditure contribution of $45,000 to the No on A campaign on May 24. As you can see on the California Secretary of State’s web site, this committee collects money from various local construction unions and disburses the money to various campaigns for candidates and ballot measures. The Assistant Treasurer of the Members’ Voice of the State Building Trades Council of California is Bob Balgenorth. But it’s Balgenorth’s other fund that’s the real story here.

A Mysterious Union (imho) “Slush Fund”, Authorized by an Obscure 1978 Federal Law to Encourage Better Relationships Between Unions and Manufacturers, Gave $1,095,000 to No on A – a Whopping 92% of All Receipts!

Something called the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust contributed a total of $1,095,000 to the No on A campaign. This is an extraordinarily high amount for a political contribution from one entity, especially concerning a local ballot measure! The head of the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust is Bob Balgenorth.

This is NOT a traditional Political Action Committee. It is an arcane type of union trust authorized by the obscure Labor-Management Cooperation Act of 1978, a law signed by President Jimmy Carter and implemented by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Inspired by the decline of unionized manufacturing in the Northeast, this federal law was meant to help industrial management and union officials build better personal relationships and cooperate against the threat of outside competition. There are no federal or state regulations specifically addressed toward these trusts, and these trusts do not have any reporting requirements to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards. This is an ambiguous and forgotten law that’s ripe for abuse.

It’s Not Union Members that Give the Money to the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust: It’s Utility Ratepayers and Contractors Working for Extorted Power Plant Owners

Since the 1990s, whenever an energy company or public utility submits an application to the California Energy Commission seeking approval of a new power plant, an organization called California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE) often “intervenes” in the licensing process. CURE submits massive data requests and environmental objections to the California Energy Commission. The applicant by law is required to answer CURE’s submissions, at significant cost and delay. The chairman of California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE) is Bob Balgenorth.

If the power plant owner agrees to sign a Project Labor Agreement and require its construction contractors to sign a Project Labor Agreement with the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California or its regional affiliates, CURE’s objections go away and the power plant can proceed unhindered through the licensing process. If the company or utility does not surrender to CURE’s demand, then CURE’s interference and lawsuits continue.

This racket – sometimes called “greenmail” because it’s the use of environmental laws to pressure developers to sign Project Labor Agreements – is well-known to the energy industry in California and has been extensively reported in the news media over the past dozen years. (For example, see Labor Coalition’s Tactics on Renewable Energy Projects Are Criticized – Los Angeles Times – February 5, 2011.)

For cases in which the power plant applicant succumbs to CURE’s harassment, the Project Labor Agreement that the power plant owner signs usually contains a provision requiring the owner or its contractors to make a lump-sum payment or series of payments to the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust.

And the Project Labor Agreement signed by the Southern California Public Power Authority (another conglomerate of publicly-owned utilities) for the construction of the City of Anaheim’s Canyon Power Plant required the agency to shell out $65,000 to the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust. See Section 13.1 of the Project Labor Agreement here.

The California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust reports these payments as “membership dues” to the Internal Revenue Service. Which brings up a question: are the local elected officials who serve as commissioners for the Northern California Power Agency and the Southern California Public Power Authority exercising their responsibilities as “members” to approve $1,095,000 in political contributions to the No on A campaign?

But Wait a Minute…Is It Legal to Have Utility Ratepayers Fund a Mysterious Union Trust Fund that Contributes to Political Campaigns, Such as No on A?

Well, in 2009 an internal committee of the Northern California Power Agency discussed whether or not a payment to the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust was an illegal gift of public funds. (See here. Note the original amount to the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust was supposed to be $150,000, but aggressive opposition to the Project Labor Agreement forced the unions to cut it down to $90,000 in order to win approval from the board of commissioners.)

To solve this uncertainty, in May 2011 State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) added a cryptic amendment at the request of union lobbyists and lawyers to the end of a large unrelated public utilities bill (Senate Bill 790) regarding “community choice aggregation.” It added Section 3260 to the Public Utilities Code: “Nothing in this division prohibits payments pursuant to an agreement authorized by the National Labor Relations Act (29 U.S.C. Sec. 151 et seq.), or payments permitted by the federal Labor Management Cooperation Act of 1978 (29 U.S.C. Secs. 173, 175a, and 186). Nothing in this division restricts any use permitted by federal law of money paid pursuant to these acts.”

No one in the California State Legislature – apparently not even Senator Leno – initially knew what this strange new provision meant. In the end, a few legislators such as Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) came to understand and reveal in floor debate that it authorized public utilities to pass on the costs of payments to labor-management cooperation committees to ratepayers. Governor Brown signed the bill into law with the language tacked on the end.

A public utility or private energy company applies to the California Energy Commission for approval to build a power plant.

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California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE) uses its “intervenor” status at the California Energy Commission to submit massive data requests and environmental complaints about the proposed power plant, as a result gumming up the licensing process and causing costly and lengthy delays for the applicant.

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Applicant for prospective power plant surrenders and agrees to sign Project Labor Agreement with State Building and Construction Trades Council of California or its regional affiliates. CURE releases its grip of legal paperwork and the project moves forward unimpeded and acclaimed as environmentally sound.

California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust makes contributions to political campaigns, such as $1,095,000 to fund 92% of the No on A campaign (Taxpayers to Preserve Community Jobs, No on Measure A, sponsored by labor and management organizations) in the City of San Diego in 2012

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Kevin Dayton is President & CEO of Labor Issues Solutions, LLC. He has analyzed public policies and developed political strategies for more than 20 years, initially as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Gary A. Franks (R-CT) and then for 17 years holding various government affairs management positions for Associated Builders and Contractors. He has endured public service as an appointee to the California Wage Board and the City of Roseville Sustainable Action Committee. While Dayton has a broad mastery of numerous policy issues, his specialties are employment and labor issues (particularly for the construction industry), environmental issues, and tax and budget issues. He is a graduate of Yale University.

Comments 2

Excellent article exposing how PLA’s operate as a drain on taxpayer (or in this case ratepayer) money; that ultimately ends up in the hands of labor unions.

You gave us plenty of jaw-dropping facts about this backstory ($1 million for a charter city ballot prop!), but this one was my favorite:

“No one in the California State Legislature – apparently not even Senator Leno – initially knew what this strange new provision meant.”

Lol. Sounds familiar. Unions write or rewrite new legislation and then hand it to the legislature, where it receives just enough attention to get rubber stamped before heading to the governor’s desk. Same thing happened with SB 922 last fall, and SB 829 this spring.

California’s not the only place where the politicians don’t understand what the unions are telling them to vote on. As seen on this video yesterday, Illinois State Rep. Mike Bost (R) lambasted the speaker for giving the representatives a mere 20 minutes to read and vote on a 200 page never-before-seen draft of a pension reform bill.

Thank you for reading the article. In half-hearted defense of the legislators and staff who actually knew about the tiny provision at the end of the lengthy Senate Bill 790 (2011), these sort of labor policies are very obscure and only understood by a few lawyers who specialize in such matters for a living on behalf of their clients, the unions. To understand the purpose of the provision, you would first need to understand the complicated story outlined in this article. Otherwise, people just assume it’s innocuous language to protect the rights of workers to organize collectively under the National Labor Relations Act. (Of course, those rights are already protected in law, so such a generalized rationale should immediately raise questions and be investigated more thoroughly.)

The hundreds of unregulated union-affiliated organizations across the country spawned by the Labor Management Cooperation Act of 1978 are probably controlling several hundred million dollars, but their existence is generally unknown.

By popular demand, I wrote a follow-up article describing the expenditures of the California Construction Industry Labor-Management Cooperative Trust, at least to the point where such information is available to the public from various sources. See this post: